Hitler and his God

The Corporal Becomes the Führer

It was in the Münchener Post that in July 1921 the text of a pamphlet was printed with the title “Adolf Hitler, Traitor”, accusing Hitler of all kinds of misbehaviour within the NSDAP, and of acting in the same fashion as the people he ranted against in his speeches and articles, the Jews. The pamphlet was written as an angry reaction against Hitler by a group of NSDAP members. The broader background was that Drexler and others, during a prolonged absence of Hitler in Berlin, had approached other small nationalist parties with the intent of an amalgamation in order to increase their political effectiveness. Hitler had not been consulted and reacted, “prima-donna-like”, with a fit of rage. He had already in those days “rapid resorts to extraordinary outbursts of uncontrolled temper”. 162 He resigned brusquely from the party on 11 July.

For a person without other means of support, who had been convinced on entering the party that “there was no turning back”, this resignation was a risky move. Or was it? Hitler knew full well that “the loss of its sole star performer would be a major, perhaps fatal, blow to the NSDAP”. 163 His apparently impulsive resignation looks more like a well-planned manoeuvre to obtain the absolute power in the party – which was entrusted to him thanks to the mediation of, once again, Dietrich Eckart: Hitler re-entered the party on 26 July and was elected “chairman with dictatorial power” three days later. He obtained, moreover, that the party programme would be regarded as inviolate and that there would be no more merger attempts with other parties or organizations.

Here the real Hitler stood up for the first time. He alone knew what he had been missioned to accomplish (and what he will never reveal to anyone); he considered the NSDAP his instrument; and he would never let anyone, under any condition, thwart his mission. In his inner mind Adolf Hitler was an absolute autocrat from those days in the summer of 1919, when an as yet unexplained change took place in him, till the moment he put a bullet through his head. Only the circumstances of his improbable rise made him temporarily hide or adapt his constant ambition. “Hitler is the extreme example of a politician who put his personal conviction of being missioned above everything else and practised politics according to the norms of his personal biography”, writes Sebastian Haffner. 164

One of the legends abroad in the land of Historia is that Hitler, in the first years of his public life, thought of himself as an announcer, a precursor, a “drummer”, assembling the people for the coming of “the Strong One from Above”, the Führer who, at the head of the German Volk, would at last lead them toward their glorious future as the Master Race. The legend that Hitler was a “drummer” until the time of his imprisonment at Landsberg and the writing of Mein Kampf originated in works like Albrecht Tyrell’s From ‘Drummer’ to ‘Führer’ (1975) and had Ian Kershaw as its chief promulgator.

It is true that Hitler called himself a “drummer” on a few occasions, but these occasions were always public addresses or conversations with outsiders, especially journalists. The reason of these acts of apparent humility is simple: at that time Hitler was to the general public no more than an upstart, a funny-looking, pretentious, fanatical newcomer on a crowded political scene in Munich, a place somewhere in the south-easterner corner of Germany. At that time the country’s Right had no shortage of leaders with dictatorial aspirations. There were the business and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg, the pan-German eminence Heinrich Class, and the commander of the Reichswehr General Hans von Seeckt. And there was above all Field Marshall Erich von Ludendorff, hero of Tannenberg and, with Paul von Hindenburg, co-dictator of Germany during the last half of the war, “who within the völkisch-nationalist camp was generally seen in the role of a future dictator” (Peter Longerich 165).

“Hitler was elaborately modest when it came to comparing his position in [the unsuccessful 1923 putsch] with Ludendorff’s. It was Ludendorff who held first place, he told the court [during the trial following the putsch], while he, Adolf Hitler, only led the political battle. For him to pretend to first place in a common enterprise with Ludendorff at his side was ‘unthinkable’.” 166 And so it was indeed. Hitler was obsessed but not crazy, not to the degree of proclaiming himself publicly as the Führer of the German people when he was still “a lonely wanderer out of nothingness” (his own words), a practically unknown Austrian, a lowly former corporal, a political backstreet adventurer and beer hall orator – while Ludendorff “was regarded as the symbol of the national struggle”. 167

But Hitler’s attitude was quite different within the Party: there, from July 1921 onwards, he acted throughout as the Führer, the one and only person in the last instance responsible for all decisions. “… By a unanimous vote at a general meeting [of the NSDAP on 29 July] the entire direction of the party was entrusted to my own hands. At the same time a new statute was passed which invested the sole responsibility in the chairman of the movement …” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “When the new statute was approved and I was appointed as president, I had the necessary authority in my hands and also the corresponding right to make short shrift of all that nonsense [i.e. the democratic process]. In the place of decisions by the majority vote of the committee, the principle of absolute responsibility was introduced.” 168 He had obtained, thanks to the mediation of Dietrich Eckart, the “dictatorial powers” which suited his ambitions, and he would never let go of them. “With a mixture of cold-bloodedness, cunning, and resolution, with that readiness to take great risks even for small goals, which he was to exhibit time and again in crucial circumstances, he succeeded in gaining control of the NSDAP while strengthening his claim to leadership of the entire national-racist movement.” (Fest 169) Kershaw himself writes: “[The July coup within the NSDAP] was the first step on transforming the NSDAP into a new-style party, a ‘Führer-party’.” 170 This is confirmed by Heiden: “From that day”, 29 July 1921, “Hitler was the leader of Munich’s National Socialist Movement.” 171

“That same evening, at the Krone Circus, Hermann Esser hailed Hitler as ‘our leader’ – unser Führer. It was Esser, too, who held forth with cynical sentimentality in restaurants and taverns as the most zealous preacher of the Führer myth. Simultaneously, Dietrich Eckart in the Völkische Beobachter began a well-orchestrated campaign to purvey the same myth. On August 4 he sketched a profile of Hitler as a ‘selfless, self-sacrificing, devoted and sincere’ man, forever ‘purposeful and alert’. A few days later came another account, this one written by Rudolf Hess, which further spiritualized the manly picture. It glorified Hitler’s ‘purest intent’, his strength, his oratory, his admirable fund of knowledge and clear intellect. The fantastic growth of the Hitler cult is evidenced by another essay, written by Hess a year later, in connection with a contest on the subject: ‘What will be the nature of the man who will lead Germany back to the summit?’ Hess’ piece took first prize …” 172

As such it was, as “the man who one day will set Germany free”, that Eckart introduced his protégé to the higher strata of Munich society. Some of its well-heeled members were Brothers and Sisters of the Thule Society; others were prominent and moneyed nationalists and Pan-Germans, like the publisher Julius Lehmann; still others belonged to the wealthy circles to which Eckart had access in his personal name and in the name of Ernst Hanfstängl, an admirer and supporter of Hitler who had studied at Harvard, was acquainted with T.S. Eliot, Walter Lippman and President Franklin Roosevelt, and ran an international arts business.

It was at the house of Hanfstängl’s sister Erna that the historian K.A. von Müller saw Hitler arrive one day: “… The bell rang. Through the open door I could see him in the narrow hallway politely and almost servilely greeting our hostess, laying aside riding whip, velour hat and trench coat, finally unbuckling his cartridge belt with revolver attached and likewise hanging it on the clothes hook. It all looked very odd, reminiscent of Karl May’s novels. As yet we did not know how precisely each of these trivialities in clothing and behaviour was even then calculated for effect, as were the strikingly close-cropped moustache, which was narrower than the unpleasantly wide-nostriled nose.” 173

Eckart introduced Hitler to the same kind of circles in Berlin and to the Wagner clan in Bayreuth, whom he knew well, for he had been a newspaper critic at the Festspiele for several years. Hamann, in her recent book Winifred Wagner, or Hitler’s Bayreuth, calls Eckart “a Wagnerian”, which reveals another interest he shared with Hitler. Winifred Wagner, the Englishwoman married to Siegfried Wagner, had spent several years of her youth in the house of the Bechsteins, the manufacturers of the famed pianos, whom she considered her stepparents. The Bechsteins had provided Eckart with funds for his magazine In Plain German. In June 1921 he introduced Adolf Hitler to them and they became “passionate friends of Hitler”, sticking by him through thick and thin. What Hitler during his climb to power owed to supporters like the Bechsteins, the Bruckmanns and the Wagners is for the greatest part still unwritten history. And at every stage of that climb, behind every move of his pupil, we perceive the hand of Dietrich Eckart, who kept up a front of the rowdy Bavarian beer drinker, jumping on tables and bellowing his poem: Sturm! Sturm! Sturm! – but who seems to have seen the real Hitler in the corporal long before anybody else did, and who guided his first steps on his fateful way.

“As Führer we need a man who does not run away when he hears the sound of a machine gun”, Eckart is reported to have exclaimed at a Stammtisch one night in early 1919. “We cannot use an officer: the people do not respect them any more! The best would be a worker with the gift of the gab – surely not a learned professor who shakes like a leaf and does it in his pants when the Reds start brandishing table legs. He does not need much brains: politics is the stupidest business in the world, and every market-woman in Munich knows more than the gentlemen in Weimar [the seat of the social-democratic government]. And he must be a bachelor, then we will get the women.” 174 In later years the existence of Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, was kept a secret from the German people. To them their Führer was that lonely figure perorating on the rostrum of the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg or reviewing, with his right arm raised, an endless armed parade. Hitler fitted Eckart’s prerequisites, but the mentor could not suspect – or could he? – that his pupil would exceed them beyond all human bonds.